Keeping it all

Uri Avnery, September 22:

Everything significant that is happening nowadays is a part of the Israeli effort to take over the West Bank and to turn it into a part of the State of Israel. All else is but foam on the water.

The pathetic Condoleezza Rice keeps coming and going. Ehud Olmert is formulating a document without content in order to create the illusion of progress towards the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. Israeli airplanes bombard a Syrian area in order to eliminate a threat of “weapons of mass destruction”. Israel prepares to bomb or not to bomb nuclear installations in Iran. President Bush is calling for an “international meeting” at an unknown date, with unknown participants for an unknown purpose.

All this is imagined reality. The real reality is unfolding on the ground, every day, every hour: nightly incursions in West Bank towns, frantic building in the settlements, enlargement of the “Israelis only” road network, further additions to the 600 or so existing roadblocks, worsening of the living conditions in the Palestinian ghettos in the West Bank and turning life in the Gaza Strip into hell.

This is the real war: the war for “the whole of the Land of Israel” – a war that has disappeared from public discourse, but that is being waged energetically, far from the eyes of Israelis living only 20 minutes drive from there. The Palestinians are fighting with their meager means but with dogged obduracy.

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